Compressed Earth Perspective

This is a discussion on Compressed Earth Perspective within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; I am beginning my graduate studies by taking a couple of classes at night (not really sure what I am ...

Compressed Earth Perspective

I am beginning my graduate studies by taking a couple of classes at night (not really sure what I am working towards yet) and one of the first courses I am taking is a STS course (Science, Technology, and Society). During the introduction, we were given a handout meant to give us a bit of perspective about the world we live in. I found it to be very interesting and I just thought I would share it.

If We Shrank the Earth's Population to 100 people....

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look approximately like the following

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would not be Caucasian
30 would be Caucasian

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth

1 would have a college education

1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for aid, acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

sure it matters, but how much...think about it: if more than 75% of the world's population would be healthy and reached a life expectancy, of lets say 65 years, than allready our planet would not be able to sustain itself. Its a sort of paradox; if you would want to help all in need, you would end up destroying everybody in the long run.

Nature is cruel, but it has to survive.

take AIDS for example...lets say we develop a cheap AIDS vaccine, and distribute it all over Africa...what happens then? well one scenario is that Africans no longer fear it and start breading by the millions!!

The planet has had an unsustainable population for years, and it is getting worse.

Aid in the form of education is necessary. Simply trying to keep everyone who is already alive - alive, there attitude to procreation must be updated. People in the third world expect a large percentage of their children to die young. Therefore they have lots of children. Save all of these children, without capping the family size simply creates unsupportable demands on the alreadt fragile agricultural systems in place, thus they starve.

adrian,
I think I've read recently about a decline in the population recently such that this could be the first century since the 1600's (Black Plague) were the population coming in is greater than that going out.(although I can't find the report now).

Axon, quite right bloody africans breedin' an that, it's a disgrace, their not even civilised like wot we are.

As to the rest of the thread, unfortunately ignorance rules, even amongst programmers.

POP QUIZ: On which continent have half the global extinctions of mammals occurred in the last 300 years?

Thanks for the link. We were debating a lot of the points made in the article and I knew that some of it had to be skewed one way or the other. Now I can print that out and take it back to class next week and bring the discussion up again. As far as the professor just blatantly handing out total crap, I don't think that was his intention at all and he wasn't necessarily presenting it as 100% correct factual data from recent surveys, but I will surely bring it up with him for his benefit. I imagine he's been using the article in the course introduction for years. However, this is a high level course and he should be more thorough regarding his sources. The words "shock effect" come to mind.

I still find the corrected numbers to be disturbing. Other points made in the snopes article are more in line with what I just assumed without ever having seen the article in the first place so maybe my perception of the world isn't so far off afterall.

>>A brief sweep of the web seems to indicate Australia has had the greatest number of mammalian extinctions in recent history, but i haven't found support for the 50% figure.<<

You win. Australia, with a population density of less than three per square kilometre(7.5 per square mile) has a very large proportion of the world's mammal extinctions to be proud of. I posted this to counter the usual rubbish that all the world's environment troubles are because 'people in the developing world
have too many babies'.

In addition, all these creatures were entirely 'human compatible'. This compares to the somewhat harder to live with lion, elephant and rhino which are mostly still around. (Although the lion is endagered and four out of five species of rhino are critically endagered or functionally extinct).